Shadowbane: A Forgotten Realms Novel

by De Bie, Erik Scott

  Today she walked her own path. She didn’t need him anymore. She had found more memories, including her name—or at least part of it: Darkdance.

  She had learned the name in Silverymoon—in an absorbed memory.

  She wasn’t sure what had driven her to the city—a feeling, perhaps, that had come over her a year ago when she had gone to the spring masquerade at the temple dressed as Lady Alustriel, one of the legendary Seven Sisters and once ruler of Silverymoon. Myrin still kept the shimmering red dress she had worn, folded carefully in the pack beside her bedroll. She felt a little tingle of recognition every time she touched it. She usually put little stock in feelings, but she understood the power of intuition. And so she’d made her way there, hoping to find someone who recognized her and could tell her something—anything—about her past.

  Alas, she’d found no one in Silverymoon who found even her name familiar. Her gold-brown skin and startling blue eyes were distinctive enough, even without the shock of azure blue hair. She checked the enrollment at the Lady’s College of Magic and had even gone to the libraries, all with no luck.

  She had despaired of finding even a hint as to her lost identity until, after a tenday, she got stuck watching a parade for the Lord Methrammar. The elderly lord was shaking hands with folk on the street. A chance touch, and she was abruptly somewhere else—someone else.

  This had happened before—a year ago, when she had touched a treacherous woman called Fayne. She’d seen a memory of herself through Fayne’s eyes, the way she must have appeared: powerful and frightening, blazing with magic.

  It passed the same with Methrammar. She became him for all of three heartbeats, and saw another night, a fantastic one filled with magic and beauty. And then she found herself sitting dazed in the street, unable to think of anything else.

  Myrin decided to examine that memory again. She adjusted into a more comfortable posture and focused on the memory. She spoke syllables of power—a simple cantrip she’d learned over the last year—and an image made of fire swirled before her. It boasted flames of various colors: silver and gold, red, and blue. She closed her eyes and remembered, all the while blindly tracing the memory into the fire with her fingertips.

  The night expanded around them, sparkling with a sea of stars. Below, Silverymoon gleamed, alight with songs and dancing. Spell-wrought images of dragons and firebirds cavorted in the skies, spiraling and twisting in glory and terror.

  The two of them stood alone at the peak of a bridge of moonlight that arched high over the river. He turned to her, a woman as radiant as the city, burning with life and power, her gown floating like gossamer. A shadowy door—a hole her magic had torn in the fabric of reality—crackled behind her, waiting. Gods, she was so beautiful.

  “My lovely Lady Darkdance,” he said. “I wish thee a fine naming day, indeed.”

  She looked up to him and smiled mysteriously, her eyes sparkling in the starlight. Her vivid blue lips parted …

  The scene faded. She had absorbed no more than a brief flash of all the memory Methrammar had of her. She doubted his fixation with her lips had been entirely proper, but she focused on the image anyway, weaving magic with her free hand as though drawing. Her ale headache increased, but she ignored the pain.

  She opened her eyes and saw the image reflected in her conjured flames. This Myrin looked so different—her blue hair glossy, her skin smooth as river-polished stone, her painted lips gleaming like sapphires. Her eyes, though, were the same iridescent blue, radiant in the moonlight. She touched her actual face, feeling her travel-roughened cheeks and her brow caked with dust.

  “My lovely Lady Darkdance,” she murmured.

  So she had a last name—and a naming day, apparently, though she could not tell which day. Nor did she know how old she had been when Methrammar saw her, or even if the memory was accurate. How long ago had that been?

  A scream came out of the night, chasing off her thoughts.

  By the fire, Boren the bard and another dwarf leaped to their feet, weapons raised. Boren fell in an instant, blood spurting from his shoulder into the midnight air.

  “Attack!” bellowed a deep voice. “To arms!”

  Myrin struggled to rise, but the memory and magic had drained her. “Oof,” she said. Her head ached something fierce.

  A wizened dwarf kneeled at her side—Elder Naros Ironhand. “Are you well, lady?”

  Her head pulsing in pain, Myrin barely understood what was going on. She remembered Naros, the ancient clan leader of the Ironhands, who’d taken her on board his caravan after he’d recognized the name “Darkdance.” He claimed to have met a half-elf by that name out of Westgate long ago—could he be her relative?

  At the moment, however, his murky recollections of her potential ancestor mattered less to her than the warhammer in his hand.

  “I can fight, I—Ah!” Abruptly, the ache in Myrin’s head grew into blinding agony and she fell to one knee, grasping her forehead. The world blinked in and out of awareness as a patch of hungry nothing drilled into her mind.

  Myrin shook the pain away and looked toward the fire, forty feet away. Dwarves were surging up from their bedrolls and cloaks, steel reflecting the dancing flames. They formed a rough circle, casting about for a foe. Within, the crumpled Boren lay moaning.

  Myrin started forward, only to have Naros grasp her by the arm. “Stay behind me, girl.” He had drawn forth his holy symbol of Moradin the All-Father.

  “I recognize and appreciate your generous offer of protection,” Myrin said, “but Boren’s hurt. I have to help.”

  Hardly knowing what she was doing, Myrin drew her wand and traced a circle in the air, leaving a shadowy trail of magic. As she watched, the trail expanded into a door perfectly sized for her—like the door she’d seen in Methrammar’s memory.

  “Gods above and below,” Naros said. “Wait—”

  Myrin slipped from his grasp, tumbled through darkness—

  —and stepped out into the firelight next to the injured bard. Sharp pain bloomed on her chest, running across her skin like a live ember. A line of runes streamed down her chest under her tunic, and a new tattoo appeared right over her heart: a door of shadow. A remembered spell.

  Dizziness gripped her for a moment—the aftereffects of the teleportation and the sudden recall of the magic—but Boren’s welling blood gave her focus. A deep gash ran between the dwarf’s shoulder and neck. With a flick of her fingers and a spark of will, Myrin formed a hand of magical force and pressed it onto the wound.

  “All will be well,” she said in Boren’s ear. “Have no fear. All—”

  “No fear.” A voice behind Myrin set her skin acrawl. She turned around.

  There, in the firelight, stood a dark figure. Myrin realized why she had not seen it at first: the creature’s charcoal black skin seemed as dark as the night. Smoke rose from its head rather than hair and the flickering fire glinted off lines of deeper black energy that traced along its skin to a pair of infinitely deep eyes. In those eyes … was nothing, as though the world ceased to exist.

  “You,” the creature said in a distinctly feminine voice. It—she—raised one finger to point at Myrin. Darkness flared around her hand. “You are the one.”

  Myrin stiffened. Not another hunter—not now! Ever since she could remember, someone had been hunting for her. Worse, that meant this attack on Clan Ironhand was all her fault.

  The dark woman rose, setting her cloak rustling in the smoky wind. Beneath the folds of the garment, the woman bore a long-handled axe. The black blade was pitted and jagged, pure murder in the crude form of a weapon.

  “Please,” Myrin said. “Your quarrel is with me alone. Leave these others—no!”

  The dwarves chose that moment to charge the dark woman from all sides, weapons leading. Seven stood against her.

  Too few.

  The woman stood unmoving until the first dwarf came within two paces. Then she swayed toward him, bringing her axe scything out from under her cloak.
It whipped over her head and struck just below the dwarf’s raised maul. The serrated blade cut straight through the haft and slashed on, sending the weapon—along with the dwarf’s hands—flopping bloodily to the ground.

  The dark woman stepped back, following the weapon’s momentum into the second brave—and foolish—dwarf. This one caught the dwarf full in the chest, but his brigandine deflected the potentially mortal blow. Still, the strike put him down, blood spurting from a deep gash in his chest. The axe whirred through the air, singing its own deadly song.

  She parried one charging dwarf, who stumbled back cursing at the force of her blow. Fluidly, she lashed out with her rear foot to catch another dwarf full in the face with a crunch. His legs shot out from under him, and he flipped backward to land in the dust.

  An unscathed dwarf managed a thrust with one of his two short swords, but the blade cut just wide of her flank. She slapped her arm down to catch the sword against her hip then turned sharply. The motion tore the blade from the dwarf’s hands and brought her deadly axe across to take the dwarf’s head off at the jawline. The brutal steel cleaved flesh like air.

  The dwarf she’d parried—along with his two surviving companions, one of them bleeding profusely from the face, the other handless—staggered away. The woman wore a stony expression as her axe spun to a halt, the haft slapping against her free hand. She’d killed or maimed four hardened warriors in the span of two breaths, and her eyes had never left Myrin.

  “Demon!” Naros charged forward, his holy symbol raised. “Begone from this place! Back to the Abyss with you!”

  The woman glanced at him blankly.

  Two dozen dwarves armed with swords, axes, and hammers encircled the central campfire. Elder Naros stepped forward.

  “If Moradin does not frighten you, perhaps steel will.” He raised his warhammer. “You may be a fiend with that blade, but we will overwhelm you.”

  The woman still had eyes only for Myrin. She raised her axe and the surviving dwarves shuddered. Idly, she set her weapon spinning like a whip over her head.

  Myrin hadn’t the least idea what this creature was or who might have sent her. She didn’t know what the woman meant to do to her, but she had no choice.

  “Stop,” Myrin said. “I surrender! Harm no more of my friends!”

  “Ironhand!” Naros cried, ignoring Myrin’s attempt at bargaining. “Attack!”

  These dwarves fared little better than the first group.

  The woman moved among them like a threshing wind, her axe flailing about. The dwarves launched blow after blow against her, but none landed. She moved aside from some; others were turned aside by the haze of darkness that swelled around her. She was a zephyr of death in the smoky night air.

  The dark woman strode through the horde of attackers like a wraith and raised her axe over Myrin. “Lady!” Naros shouted.

  Magic flowed from Myrin without conscious thought. She thrust up her wand and the axe struck a shield of light that appeared between them.

  The woman pulled the axe back, nodded in acknowledgment, then kicked Myrin in the belly. Myrin staggered back and collapsed, wheezing.

  The woman strode forward but Naros stepped in her path. He struck the woman’s axe with his hammer and she fell back. “Flee!” he cried. “Flee, my lady!”

  Myrin forced herself to one knee, gasping for the breath that had been knocked from her body. She had to do something—had to end the fight.

  A spell came to her, then, rising unbidden from the depths of her mind. She didn’t recall ever having cast it herself, but she knew where she had seen it cast. A year past, in Fayne’s memory, Myrin had watched the spell conjure crippling terror in a foe’s mind. If Myrin could remember how to cast it, perhaps she could shock the dark woman into stillness. But the spell was so black and terrible. How could she—?

  The dark woman knocked Naros’s hammer out of his hands and drew her axe up. The dwarf glared up at her, defiant to the end.

  No choice. Myrin shaped the awful spell around her gray-white wand. “Your worst fear to unmake you!” she declaimed in the horrid Abyssal tongue.

  A ray of blackness struck the dark woman and for an instant Myrin felt a surge of relief. But the woman wasn’t stunned—she wasn’t even slowed.

  Then the niggling pain in Myrin’s head flared and she realized that she was seeing into the woman’s mind.

  Inside was nothing.

  Myrin stood on the precipice of a sheer, shattering vastness. No warmth—no life. Only herself and the void. She fell to her knees, blood trickling from her nose.

  The dark woman looked back at her and her lip curled slightly. She kicked the clan leader away then spun her axe overhead as the rest of the dwarves rushed her. She brought the weapon down in a thunderous swipe upon the ground, and a black whirlwind sent the dwarves flying.

  Black manacles appeared around Myrin’s arms and legs and an irresistible force drew the wizard forward. Myrin struggled as the woman grasped her by the throat.

  “No fear in the darkness,” the woman said. “No pain in the void.”

  The world shivered around them and Myrin could feel the woman drawing her in—over the precipice into emptiness.

  A single thought intruded, like a faint ray of hope. Myrin couldn’t explain why her mind flowed this way, but flow it did, and she spoke even though no one could hear.

  “Kalen,” Myrin choked out. “Kalen Shadowbane.”

  Her voice vanished into nothingness.

  21 KYTHORN (EVENING)

  LUSKAN.

  A seeping, lice-ridden sore, the so-called City of Sails squatted on the Sea of Swords, oozing its corruption into land and water alike. The ground itself reacted against Luskan as a body might to a boil, growing chapped and barren for a league in all directions. One could smell the city at that distance—a sickly mixture of rancid meat, old dust, and shit, which only grew thicker as one approached.

  As dusk fell, a lone rider approached, his gray cloak flying out behind him in a trail of dust. He held no illusions about the city—in fact he knew it better than most. He knew enough not to return, and yet he had no choice.

  Kalen Dren never did seem to have much choice.

  Ever a hole, Luskan had suffered two blows near a century past: The pirate kings had clashed with painful consequences for the city, and then the Spellplague struck. The city existed now as a mere mockery of what it had been. In the Year of Deep Water Drifting, Luskan was its own small nation, ruled by thieves and madmen.

  Greasy smoke from half a hundred chimneys formed a haze over the city as forbidding as the thick walls around it. Every morning, the walls were hung with the remains of fresh victims of the city, grisly totems that drove back invaders without needing a single living defender.

  Lately, Luskan had acquired another line of defense: a contingent of Waterdhavian Guard stood sentry around the city. Summer was, after all, plague season, and if Luskan suffered a new malady, the Guard’s strict quarantine would keep it contained.

  It was, in short, the last place any sane traveler would ever want to go.

  The lone man rode with eyes fixed upon the rotting city. His sword gleamed, an eye-in-gauntlet sigil etched on its hilt. Kalen felt vague warmth through his glove at its touch, and he knew that the blade would have burned any other man. But thanks to his spellscar, he could barely feel even the deepest of cuts. To him, this pain offered only dull distraction—the niggling reminder that he was no longer worthy of his sword.

  He could bear that.

  He thought of the note—the scrap of parchment folded up inside his leather breastplate, close to his heart. He thought of the hand that had written it and of the single word—Luskan—scrawled in blood across the neat handwriting. Inviting him—challenging him. “Come and find her,” those six letters had implied. “If you can.”

  Kalen Dren came with a purpose and would not be swayed.

  Not if he had to kill every single son of a bitch in the godsdamned city.

 
; As the sun dipped, signaling the last hour before the shifts changed, relief filled the guards on duty at the isolated cliffside gate at the south end of the city.

  It was a small gate—more a flaw in Luskan’s wall, actually, broken open during the earthquake that had ripped through the region twenty or so years past. Accessible on foot or by boat, it stood beside a precipitous fall into the churning waves of the Sea of Swords. Locals called it “Cliffside Cranny” for its forbidding location and narrow opening. Nevertheless, folk had used it to smuggle captives or exiled nobles in and out, at least until the Waterdhavians erected a crude barricade to seal the gap, leaving a tiny space at the very top.

  Rhetegast Hawkwinter, the younger of the two guardsmen, yawned and sighed as dusk brought blessed cool air. Luskan was experiencing a heat wave the last few tendays, one that did not show signs of stopping. The half-elf—Rhett to his friends—had received his first gauntlet not two tendays past, and ye gods, had life in the Guard proved both uncomfortable and a bore.

  “Another day in service to the Lords, another day sitting on our haunches.” Rhett stretched. “That was a long shift. I, for one, look forward to a bit of the watered ale they foist upon us back at the camp. I thought it ghastly at first, but—Carmael? Are you even listening?”

  The second of the Trusties—an irritable Cormyrean expatriate by the name of Carmael—was poring over dispatches from Waterdeep: orders, wanted notices, and the like. His cragged face remained passive and his eyes kept to his work.